Interview: Rise of the Robots Redux

Ryan Calo, a legal privacy expert at Stanford, believes we’re finally on the precipice of a genuine robot revolution. He expects it will transform our everyday lives as much as the PC and Internet did.

This shift, however, poses critical legal and policy questions that must be grappled with, both to propel the transformation and to protect businesses and consumers as it happens.

Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, has increasingly turned his attention to these issues in recent months. He established the Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving Projects, chairs the committee on robotics and artificial intelligence for the American Bar Association and has written several academic papers on the topic.

In an interview printed in this morning’s Chronicle, he discussed the promises and challenges of a robotic renaissance. The interview continues below.

Q: We’ve seen how inviting third parties to develop for platforms like the iPhone and Android vastly accelerated and broadened the availability of apps and uses for smart phones. But you’ve written that there’s a reluctance to this sort of “openness” in robotics, from companies who don’t want to be held liable for reprogrammed robots that go on rampage or something.

My favorite theoretical example from your paper was a Roomba that someone programs to play real life Frogger on a highway.

How do we strike a middle ground that corporate counsel will be OK with, while still allowing the sort of innovation that will only come with open innovation?

A: I think that what we should do is to think about a narrow immunity. And by narrow I mean, not total. If you build an inherently dangerous robot that’s one thing. But I think we should immunize people for what the end user or the consumer does with the robot.

Here I’m taking a page from the early Internet. In the mid 1990s, there was a law passed, the Communications Decency Act.

All the provisions related to decency were struck down rather spectacularly by the Supreme Court. But the one thing that stayed, Section 230, says that the platform will not be (held liable) as the publisher of what your users say on the website.

Without that exception, why would you ever create a platform that allows comments (like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and news sites)?

I agree with Eric Goldman at Santa Clara University that it’s no accident that all the more innovative Internet companies come out of the United States. That partly because we’re innovative and got a head start, but it’s also because we got this immunity question right.

We need a similar policy that immunizes manufacturers of open robots for what users do with robots, so that they don’t have a disincentive against keeping them open.

One final point about openness: My definition of an open robot includes not just software. It should also be built in a way that allows you to swap out parts, it should be modular.

What does that matter? Let’s say you buy this really expensive item, probably the most expensive thing after your car. It’s state of the art at the time, but six months later, somebody comes out with a better sensor or better manipulators.

If a robot is closed, you have to wait until the company licenses the technology and you can buy another one. But when you buy something modular, you’re not penalized to the same degree by future advances.

Q: What are the companies or researchers or groups best exemplifying the open approach today?

A: I’ll give you examples that are open and those that are closed. Willow Garage is by far the best example of open. They’re a very innovative startup located in Silicon Valley.

They’re paradigmatically open. They use an open source operating system, so you can program their robots. And they’re not designed for any particular purpose. They lent out a bunch of their expensive robots, PR2s, and reportedly every lab modified it in some way.

Now compare that to Sony’s AIBO from a few years ago. It’s a toy robot dog, and it can do basically two things. There’s a software package to raise it from a puppy and one that allows you to give it a variety of voice commands.

That’s neat, but what people thought was really neat was if they could go in and write their own programs. There became this sort of library online of applications. It became this vibrant ecosystem that everyone was excited about. And then, of course, Sony intervenes by suing over copyright.

The backlash that resulted from that ended up causing Sony to have to shut down the line. The epilogue is that Sony then decided, ‘well, gosh, maybe it’s OK for people to do this.’ They opened it back up and created a software development kit and it picked back up. But it’s too late.

Q: One of Google’s self-driving cars got into the first known accident the other week. It appears it was human error, luckily for Google. But clearly it raises the question: Does that first real self-driving accident, especially a fatality, just kill the possibility over this ever being acceptable in the public mind?

A: There are a lot of reasons to believe, if autonomous vehicles are as good as engineers claim they can be, that they’re very likely to reduce the universe of fatal accidents.

But whether or not a crash involving an autonomous vehicle causes a backlash will depend on the circumstances.

If an autonomous car is programmed to avoid strollers and shopping carts, but is confronted by both at once and swerves into stroller, then yes, robot driving is over in the United States. There’s a lot of fear of robots, so maybe not matter what, as soon as a robot car fatality happens, that’s it.

But my hope is that it won’t. Hopefully, you’ll have thousands and thousands of hours of uneventful driving and you can point to the statistics that show we have enormously reduced fatalities.